Improving Learning Outcomes: Lessons from Rigorous Evidence

Global efforts are underway to improve education quality—to ensure children are not only in school but learning and developing to their full potential. Although many theories exist on the best approaches to improve education quality, policymakers and implementers need evidence on which programs are effective at helping children actually learn while in school. This brief summarizes and provides key lessons from multiple meta-analyses and over two dozen randomized evaluations (both IPA and non-IPA studies) on improving learning outcomes in low-income countries, with a focus on basic education.

Read the full brief on Improving Learning Outcomes.

FEATURED BLOG POST

IPA Launches $5.4 Million Initiative to Protect Digital Finance Users

By Rafe Mazer

IPA's Financial Inclusion Program has launched the first ever impact evaluation fund for consumer protection work in emerging markets, thanks to generous support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The initiative will support research to drive better consumer protection measures in digital finance, particularly in areas such as fraud, complaints handling, product information, and consumer choice. In this post, project director Rafe Mazer explains why this initiative is needed and how it will generate important insights to help consumers and providers of digital finance around the globe.

Read the full blog post on the digital consumer protection initiative.

Do "Superstar" Businesses Drive Economic Growth? A Comparison Between the U.S. and Colombia

Researchers: Marcela Eslava, John Haltiwanger, Alvaro Pinzón

Startups in developing countries tend to grow more slowly on average than those in high-income countries, but the reasons why are not well understood. Researchers analyzed data on all manufacturers with more than 10 employees in Colombia and the U.S. over a period of 30 years to compare employment growth among manufacturers in each country. Results suggest that this average pattern is explained by differences in the tails of the distributions: slower growth over the lifecycles of businesses in Colombia than in the U.S. is driven by a smaller contribution among plants with extraordinary growth and a higher likelihood of young underperforming plants remaining active. The youngest cohorts of firms explain the bulk of employment growth in the medium term. These findings suggest that less dynamic high-growth entrepreneurship plays a role in the disparity in economic development between Colombia and the U.S.

Read the full summary here and the working paper here.